Reliability

In earlier times the suitability of a structural design was assessed by judgment, experiments, and simple analysis. In the twentieth century the concept of stress became dominant as a failure criterion, with “allowable stress” as the primary design paradigm. That approach was extended to “limit-state design” in the 1980s supported by the reliability methods described on this page. Optimization algorithms are included here because they appear in reliability analysis, and because they support reliability-based design optimization. Almost all the notes on this page are relevant when I teach CIVL 518.